The Swedish really know how to make films about children. Pictures such as Fanny and Alexander, My Life as a Dog and Let the Right One In achieve a condition too often absent from mainstream US musings on growing up: sensitivity undiluted by sentimentality. These films are fond of young folk, but they rarely find them angelic.
Few directors have done better work in this field than Lukas Moodysson. With Show Me Love and Together, the director offered poignant meditations on the pain that comes with passing into adolescence. After that Moodysson drifted into pessimistic experiments – including one, Lilya 4-ever, that offered a truly horrific take on the teenage life. He has now returned triumphantly to the material that made his name.
Music fans who were young in the early 1980s will be particularly charmed by We Are the Best!. Only those who somehow managed to grow up without passing through childhood will be left entirely cold by it.
What we have here is a kind of anti-Commitments. Three Swedish kids gain a degree of meaning in their lives through participation in a band. Unlike the heroes of the durable Alan Parker picture, the punk band in We Are the Best! achieve no unlikely levels of proficiency. The astringency is (as punk veterans will attest) all part of the aesthetic.
Shot in washed-out shades that suggest ancient Kodachrome, the picture introduces us to two crop-haired, slightly androgynous girls named Bobo (Mira Barkhammar) and Klara (Mira Grosin).
Like all sensible kids at that age, they find school sports unimaginably pointless and view conventional society as a farce. The spectacled Bobo, daughter to a fuddled mother, is the less unhinged of the two. Klara tends more towards impulsive decisions and emotional responses.
Life changes for the girls when they get into a squabble with a hilarious heavy rock band – thatched hair, power chords – and, just to be difficult, book a slot at the facility where their rivals rehearse. Klara grabs a convenient bass and begins wailing while thumbing the strings (she may do neither particularly well, but she does both better than Sid Vicious). Bobo takes to the drums.
Their first song. which develops over the course of the film, is an admirable attack on the stupidity of team sports. "Children in Africa are dying, and all you care about is the high-jump team!" they bellow repeatedly, before realising that the high-jump is an individual sport.
Eventually they decide to invite someone who can actually play into the band. In many ways, Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne) could not be less suitable: she is older, Christian and plays folk songs on the acoustic guitar. But Klara and Bobo are smart enough to realise that Hedvig’s pious sobriety makes her even more of an outcast at school than they are.
Most of the crises that assail the friends are small ones. Klara and Bobo get in trouble for cutting Hedvig’s hair. A meeting with another all-male punk band causes frictions. But the flawless young actors, effortlessly natural throughout, always convey the sense that life and death is at stake. Then they chuckle, spit and scoff a handful of dangerously pink confectionary.
Based on a graphic novel by Coco Moodysson, the director's wife, We Are the Best! does not allow its concern with underlying social issues to interfere with its largely optimistic outlook. It offers arguments for rebellion and for creative aggression. It sparkles with the unpredictability of youth.
Most importantly, unlike too many contemporary high school movies, it addresses female friendships without feeling the need to extract humour from bitchiness. An unqualified delight.
